Thomas Eggerer’s new paintings in Todd, the artist’s sixth solo show at Petzel, present the viewer with aerial views of street surfaces—topographical evolutions of Eggerer’s longstanding interest in public spaces.

Each square canvas features precisely choreographed fragments of resting bodies, cutting in from the margins of the painting. This temporal occupation is contrasted with a circular “lid” or “cover” and intersecting parallel diagonals. The lids carry institutional significance, pointing to municipal authority, which contrasts with the transient fragility of leisurely carnal exposure. The lids also emphasize the presence of a concealed space underneath, quintessential to New York street life.

While the aerial viewpoint allows for voyeuristic surveillance, the 90 degree rotation from the birds-eye vista to the gallery wall, generates a vertiginous perspective where gravity and weight become factors. The resulting destabilization of a fixed viewing position is further augmented by the fact that the paintings appear to gyrate around the lids, subjecting the bodies to centrifugal forces and pointing to the space beyond the margins of the canvas.

The fragmentation of the bodies has a limiting effect on the bodies’ self-determination, and yet, perhaps as a consequence, it intensifies the fetishistic charge of the exposed skin, which is rendered in great detail like all other parts of the paintings. This attention to detail appears to be a new development in Eggerer’s work, which has previously exploited tensions between line and color or the “finished” vs. the “unfinished”. Hands appear to play a particular role here; while the purpose of the body as a whole is often unclear, manual activities are rendered with exacting precision (touching, holding, pushing). These gestures and poses appear somewhat out of place in a public space. The street floor is not treated like a part of the urban arena but rather like a natural domestic habitat.

Petzel Gallery is located at 456 West 18th Street New York, NY 10011. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM–6:00 PM.

The Baroque always connects two extremes, like light and shadow, in one body, one painting. History outside against a wild body inside, cultured and uncultured, cooked and uncooked, greed and expressionism, rationalism and irrationalism, cold and hot.
—Adriana Varejão

Gagosian is pleased to present “Interiors,” an exhibition by Adriana Varejão, one of Brazil’s most renowned contemporary artists. A collateral project of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, this is Varejão’s first-ever West Coast exhibition and includes important loans from Brazil and Europe in a selected survey from the last twenty years.

Embodying the fraught pluralism of Brazilian identity and the diverse implications of social, cultural, and aesthetic exchange, Varejão’s unprecedented artistic forms—which encompass painting, sculpture, and video installation—reach across time and place, exposing the multivalent nature of history, memory, and cultural representation.

In “Interiors,” the spatial drama of the Baroque assumes many forms: from the guise of Minimalism’s cool geometries; to the uncertainty that disrupts the seamless logic of the painted surface; to the ruins of Euclidean architecture, thick with flesh, blood, and fat. In the Sauna paintings, Varejão invents chambers tiled in intricately painted monochromatic gradations, recalling the perspectival grids underlying Renaissance masterpieces, as well as the geometries of the modern digital realm. In O iluminado [The Shining] (2009), yellow vibrates across the entire color spectrum, its bright energy underscored by seemingly infinite variations in hue. The abstracted spaces depicted in these paintings are at once familiar and strange, recalling bathhouses, swimming pools, slaughterhouses, and hospitals—places of routine and leisure, life and death. Light beams from an undetectable source; with no visible exits, the environments appear as psychologically charged labyrinths, seductive thresholds for the viewer's gaze. In the intimately scaled singular painting, The Guest (2004), blood pools on white tiles, a forensic trace of the body and its vulnerability.

Parede com incisóes á la Fontana [Wall with Incisions in the Style of Fontana] (2000) depicts a light blue tiled wall slashed vertically, like the canvases of Lucio Fontana. However, instead of revealing empty voids, Varejão’s canvas bleeds from its deep gashes, creating an equivalence with the human body by drawing on the Baroque tradition of painting livid flesh. For Varejão, flesh is a symbolic tool, infusing the ordinary with an inherent eroticism to stir both attraction and repulsion. It sits beneath and between the tiled surfaces of her ruínas de charque (jerked beef ruins), wall and floor sculptures whose titles refer to real locations in Portugal, Brazil, and Italy. In Rome Meat Ruin (2016), sections of pale yellow, blue, and white tiles meet along a straight, towering corner fragment, only to erupt into masses of deep red viscera. And in Açougue Song (2000), chunks of meat are strung across the canvas, entirely coated in a crackled white monochrome effect inspired by the morphologies of Song dynasty glazed ceramics.

These surface fractures become deeper, verging on geological, in Varejão’s Azulejão (“big tile”) paintings, made by applying a thick layer of viscous plaster to canvas and allowing it to dry naturally over a long period of time. Ongoing since the first iteration in 1988, the paintings are based on the traditional square, glazed terracotta tiles (azulejos) that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese national art since the Middle Ages. Absorbing influences from Moorish artisans, Italian Renaissance painting, Chinese porcelain, and Dutch décor, the azulejo is a metaphor for the mixing of cultures, whether by force or by desire. Previously, Varejão has arranged her paintings in vast grids, echoing the traditional use of the azulejo in architecture, but with visible disruptions to the narrative schemes; or created large individual works whose images—whether a geometric pattern, a sinuous flourish, or a figurative motif—move towards abstraction. The most recent monochromes—each a variation of porcelain “white”—with their open cracked surfaces, are as seismic as they are sublime.

During Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Transbarroco, Varejão’s only multi-channel video installation to date, will also be on view for the first time in the U.S., following recent presentations in Brazil, Portugal, and Italy. This compelling work, shot on location in Brazil, captures in sweeping takes specific details of noted Baroque church interiors that relate the story of cultural exchange and assimilation, underscored by an ambient sound collage intercut with recitations of key writings on Brazilian identity.

In 2008, a permanent pavilion dedicated to Varejão’s art was inaugurated at Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. In 2016, she was commissioned to produce a temporary mural based on her epic work Celacanto provoca maremoto to cover the entire facade of the Centro Aquático for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro; and the video installation Transbarroco was presented at the French Academy of Rome - Villa Medici to coincide with her exhibition at Gagosian Rome.

“Adriana Varejão: Interiors” is part of the Participating Gallery Program of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an ambitious and far-reaching series of thematically linked exhibitions and programs of Latin American and Latino art in dialog with Los Angeles. An initiative of The Getty and generously supported by The Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will take place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. For more information, visit pacificstandardtime.org.

Brand New Gallery is pleased to present “Casitas”, the first solo gallery exhibition by Enoc Perez in Italy.
On view a selection of paintings from Enoc Perez’ Casitas series. These small and intimate oil paintings portray Enoc’s own humble beginnings in Puerto Rico through the depiction of the island’s own vernacular architecture.
He focalizes his attention on his native land with semi-abstract but emotionally evocative Puerto Rican architectures, homelands which immigrants have left behind in order to pursue better lives in the US.
The works conjure emotionally-charged memories that Latino immigrants carry with them as they pursue the American dream.
Named after places in Puerto Rico, these unpretentious paintings combine abstract elements with representation to capture a haunting feeling of Puerto Rico’s distant past and contemporary present. Splattered fields of thick paint and vivid color are combined to create emotionally charged paintings that conjure up the island’s diverse cultural instant.
Born in San Juan in 1967, Enoc Perez first took painting lessons at the age of eight. Son of an art critic, he spent family vacations traveling to museums in different countries and learning about art history. In 1986, Perez moved to New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute before earning his master’s degree at Hunter College. Finding himself at odds with the program at Hunter, where students and faculty criticized his paintings as overly seductive and decorative, Perez maintained his belief in the importance of the aesthetics in art. Embracing art’s potential for pleasure and beauty, Perez paints sensuous nudes, still lifes, tropical resorts, and modern architectural icons in a sleek aesthetic with dazzling, vibrant colors.